Wholly Smokes (10 page)
If we don’t, we may be in trouble. The current medical concerns about smoking could be only the tip of an iceberg – a very large iceberg. Tobacco companies could become the target of a long-term campaign of government harassment. As soon as we add filters, the government could ask for something else: tar reduction, say, or
Poison
labels. We might even be forbidden to advertise on radio and television.To prevent these kinds of injuries, we must diversify into food, adding a second string to our bow. Whatever happens to tobacco, food always has a future.
Within a year, GST plunged wholeheartedly into the food markets, acquiring cake mixes, cereals, bakeries, and canneries. GST would eventually own thousands of well-known brands, including Jeeter Peanut Butter, Fruitricious cereals, Kubla Khan cake mixes, Dolphin tuna, and of course Bentley nuts.
President John F. Kennedy had won the 1960 Presidential election by a narrow margin. He needed the help of tobacco state legislators to put through his ambitious program. At the same time, he was aware the public was calling for a government study of tobacco and health problems.
There had already been such a study in Britain (the Royal College of Physicians’ Report). When asked about it at a press conference, Kennedy said,
That matter is sensitive enough and the stock market is in sufficient difficulty without my giving you an answer which is not based on complete information, which I don’t have, and, therefore, perhaps I will be glad to respond to that question in more detail next week.
In the case of GST, the President’s dilemma was even more perplexing, because of his acquaintance with Woody Badcock. Woody considered himself a personal friend of Kennedy’s. Indeed, when Cuba became a problem, it was Woody who suggested a way for the CIA to eliminate
Fidel Castro. As Woody explained,
I told Jack what we needed was to slip Castro an exploding cigar. The idea tickled him. We had quite a laugh, picturing that little bearded creep blowing himself up with a stogie like a cartoon cat. So I put my best lab boys to work on it, and we designed and built a prototype to CIA specifications. It worked like this: You first arm the thing by removing the cigar band. Then when you light it up, Bang! It worked like a charm. Blew up a lot of watermelons, had a hell of a good time.
We delivered it and the CIA managed to smuggle it into Cuba and into Castro’s private humidor. Unfortunately, it never went off. Turns out that Castro liked to smoke cigars without removing the band.
The CIA had another plan, to get Castro to visit an obscure street in Havana, and there drop a large weight marked “1 TON” on his head. But by then, I guess Jack lost interest. He didn’t even tell me, just stopped returning my calls. Finally a couple of CIA types came around to say, forget all about the project, “it never happened.” Yeah, right.
Jack and I were never close again. Maybe he was embarrassed or something.
I guess he had a really full schedule. There was the trouble with Marilyn, and then the Bay of Pigs, and then he had to make this trip to Dallas. You know, I can’t help but think, if we’d sent Fidel that exploding cheroot, Jack would still be alive today. Anyway, it was a hell of a funny idea.
The 1960s brought other changes, including the end of doctor ads. For a time, there was the false hope of legal pot (along with everyone else, GST spent the decade madly scrambling after trademark names like
Aztec Mellow)
.
There was also a return to Western ads. A new series showed a hard-bitten cowpoke with a leathery face – a man who valued freedom, a man who went his own way – squatting by the campfire to light his filter-tip Castlerays with a branding iron.
Freedom was the watchword. This was no longer a time for consulting authorities or taking orders. White-haired doctors were no longer respected. Young smokers wanted to follow a romantic rebel into new territory. Everybody wanted to be Lenny Bruce, or Jimi Hendrix, or at least Steve McQueen on a motorcycle.
All this would continue into the era of health warnings.
Health warnings began to appear in the later 1970s, and with them came advertising restrictions. It was almost necessary to pretend that cigarettes weren’t cigarettes at all. “Lights” appeared, and herbal cigarettes.
Dwight Badcock
Elwood (“Woody”) Badcock retired in 1975, handing the torch to his son, Dwight. Dwight Badcock was a bashful-looking young man who seemed almost hiding from the world behind masses of hair, heavy sideburns, and a mustache. He was the first Badcock who did not smoke. But he was every inch a Badcock from his platform shoes on up to his display of hair (one journalist referred to it as a “hirsute of happiness”).
Make no mistake, we are at war with the government. Call me crazy, but I feel we’re going to win this war. Maybe not today. Maybe not next year. But let us bide our time. In the long run, we are going to win the hearts and minds of the people. The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind!
Biding its time, the company continued to diversify into food. It already owned a range of cereals, cake mixes, and cookies. Now the company name was changed to GST Foods, as it began buying up fast food franchises: the lucrative Little Dorrit, the surprisingly successful Mister Bagel, the elegant Pizza Jardin, and the down-home good profits of GFC (formerly Grannie’s Fried Catfish).
Another change was the introduction of menthol. Dwight came from that generation who knows that menthol cigarettes go well with marijuana. His new menthol brand,
Tubular Bells
, was meant to take market share away from Kools and Salems. It became a cult classic, but never really achieved significant market share.
In the 1980s, tobacco came under even more government pressure. TV and radio commercials vanished. Even billboards and magazine ads were forced (by industry agreements) to display government warning labels.
For a time, GST Foods attempted to soften the blow, by including not one warning, but two:
T
HE
S
URGEON
G
ENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT CIGARETTE SMOKING IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH
.
O
F COURSE, THE
S
URGEON
G
ENERAL WORKS FOR THE GOVERNMENT
. A
ND WE ALL KNOW THE GOVERNMENT
NEVER
LIES TO US
.
Naturally, the Surgeon General’s office took a dim view of this. There was talk of new harsher legislation. Finally, GST agreed to display the government warning without commentary.
The answer was a series of 1980s ads, seen in magazines and on billboards, that tried to make health warnings somehow irrelevant. A typical ad would show a group of young, healthy, athletic people of both sexes having active fun – water polo or touch football or snowball fights – in the healthy intimacy of contact sports. They were laughing like lunatics. Somewhere far down the page, far below them, lurked the ominous
white warning label from the Surgeon General. But all of the people in the ad were laughing, laughing with their eyes closed, and so unable to see the offensive warning label at their feet.
Come join us
, was the subliminal message.
Come join the fun. Close your eyes to that abominable warning
. It’s not known whether anyone got the message, but GST cigarette sales continued to rise.
By the mid-1990s it was clear that many of the old marketing ideas no longer won customers. The tobacco world was shrinking. Instead of mass marketing, maybe it was time to invent new products, to target smaller, individual markets: grandparents, teens, health-conscious young adults, working mothers, and so on.
One ad, aimed at young middle-class urban adults, showed a healthy young couple in expensive outdoors clothes lashing a canoe on top of their Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was no longer possible to show them actually smoking, but a large red cigarette pack floated in the air near them. The cigarette was called
Moccasin
. “Remember Moccasin,” said the headline. “The noble red man’s gift of golden tobacco.” (Around the company, this ad became known as Bury My Lung at Wounded Knee.)
The same principle was applied to other groups. Senior citizens who wanted to save money could turn to
Cheap Jack
brand (“All the flavor, half the price, no nonsense.”). Working mothers might relax at the kitchen table, inhaling
My Break
cigarettes. Women in fashionable jogging clothes might light up
Lungs of Steel
cigarettes. There would be a brand created especially
for every conceivable consumer group.
It was Dwight Badcock who suggested a brand for kids.
His confidential internal memo put it bluntly:
I see one huge, unexploited target market, largely ignored by our competitors, but ready for us.
This is the youth market
.Call me crazy, but I say this apple is ripe for plucking.
Ask yourself: Why does the idea of kids smoking have such a negative image today? After all, kids have always smoked. Many of you probably smoked as a kid. It did you no harm.
Who says smoking is bad for kids? A few weak-minded politicians, a few spoil-sport doctors, but mainly those mean-spirited groups who simply want to ban something. They’re desperately afraid that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying something. Early in our century they banned alcohol. Today they’re after tobacco, but where will they stop? Will they want to ban coffee and tea? Will they seek FDA regulation of chocolate ice cream?
Make no mistake, this is our fight for life. If we do nothing, if we hold still for it, our enemies will shut us down. It’s
time to take a stand and fight back. It’s time for us to say, Yes, we are selling cigarettes to kids, and so what? You think we don’t care about our kids? We love them, but we don’t want to shield them from the real world. It’s time to let them step up to the plate and experience some tough love. Some
Puff Love
.That’s what we’ll call our new campaign: O
PERATION
P
UFF
L
OVE
. Through it, we intend to sell far more than cigarettes. We can sell the GST concept, the entire GST family of friendly products.Call me crazy, but I think this just might work.
Some members of the board did indeed call him crazy (later they would wonder if he wasn’t showing the first signs of his tragic illness). But others looked upon Dwight’s “madness” as nothing short of genius. In any case, they all went along with Operation Puff Love.
This campaign eventually divided the target market into three groups, ages five to ten, ten to fourteen, and fourteen to eighteen. These corresponded closely to grade school, middle or junior high, and high school. A completely different approach was mapped out for each group.
The Group One Campaign: Cap and Snap
Kids in Group One, ages five to ten, were most easily influenced by animated cartoons. What was needed was an endorsement of the product by a cartoon character.
For a time, the GST marketing people hoped the character would be Pinocchio. They imagined showing cuts from the Disney movie, namely, those terrific scenes where the boys are taken to an island with cigars growing on trees (naturally they would leave out the part where the boys get sick or turn into donkeys).
A vain hope in any case, for there was no way to get the Disney people to go along with such a scheme. So GST decided instead to start from scratch with its own unique cartoon hero. Heroes, rather, for there must be one for boys and one for girls.
The boys would be introduced to
Cap’n Savage
, a feisty little pirate who gets into numerous scrapes but always vanquishes his gigantic opponents. Any boy who likes violence – and what boy doesn’t? – will love Cap’n Savage.
The girls wouldbe introduced to
Snapdragon
, a lovable little pink-and-lavender dragon who breathes flowers instead of fire. Any girl who likes cuddly pet toys – ponies or unicorns – would love little Snapdragon.